A Dozen Who Shaped the 80s
California’s image as a pacesetter held up fairly well in the 1980s in the world of business and economics. Californians were a force for dramatic change.
Some achieved change on a grand scale--inspiring a revolution in economic policy or transforming corporate finance. Some of the change may seem minor, but it altered our daily routines and our life styles. Some business people built firms that are monuments to America’s spirit of enterprise; others brought companies to ruin and became symbols of corporate recklessness.
Here is a sampling of California residents who gave American business a 1980s makeover--making it better, or worse, or just more fun.
ARTHUR B. LAFFER
In the early 1980s, Arthur B. Laffer’s name was a household word. The crusading analyst was a leader of the supply side movement, a band of ideological outsiders who stressed lower tax rates as the key to economic growth.
But the outsiders became insiders in Ronald Reagan’s White House. Laffer’s famous mathematical curve gave the president an intellectual tool to justify tax cuts. And the efforts were rewarded when Congress slashed taxes in the Reagan years, dropping the top individual rate to 33% from 70%.
Critics have blamed Laffer and other tax-cut advocates for the federal budget deficit--estimated at $152 billion in fiscal 1989--which has weakened the U.S. economy.
But Laffer maintains that the cuts succeeded in stimulating economic growth and raising federal revenue; the deficit has persisted, he argues, because Congress failed to control spending. “The supply side won,” he said last year. “We won.”
These days--when not tending to his exotic collection of plants and animals--Laffer, 49, spends most of his time on business travel. He is chairman of Laffer, Canto & Associates, an economic consulting firm and merchant bank in La Jolla, and lives on a 17-acre mountain retreat in San Diego County.
Despite a lower profile, he has kept a hand in politics. He mounted an unsuccessful bid in 1986 for the Republican senatorial nomination. Last summer, he was among a group of experts who advised President Bush on economic matters at a Camp David meeting. And in October he helped Rep. Ed Jenkins (D-Ga.) fashion a proposal to cut the capital gains tax, which prevailed on the House floor.
